Thorough and comprehensive UPS testing & commissioning is critical for a number of reasons, namely: validating its operational performance, but also protecting your hardware from faulty and potentially dangerous irregularities.
When investing large sums of money in your business, you need to ensure that the equipment you will be relying on – can indeed be relied upon.
Failing to do this can be costly for your business as you can easily miss potential flaws and weaknesses that can otherwise be unearthed through careful and controlled testing. Read on and we’ll share a comprehensive guide to ensuring your UPS installation was successful.
Before you start testing & commissioning your UPS system, there are a few boxes you’ll need to tick off:
The first step is to make sure that you have all of the necessary tools and equipment to carry out thorough testing & commissioning. These include (but are not limited to):
Don’t forget your personal protective equipment!
Once you have all of the necessary tools and equipment, next you must take all of the appropriate safety precautions such as site safety inductions and carrying out initial checks (i.e., looking for damp and/or damage).
The best way to avoid any complication is to hire the professionals for installation & maintenance services. That way, they can ensure that everything is installed properly – followed by comprehensive testing & commissioning before signing off and giving you the green light.
Functional testing for UPS systems involves testing the system and all its intended functions. This includes:
As the name suggests, performance testing is all about making sure that your UPS system will perform well under an actual load in a variety of different conditions. This includes:
Acceptance testing (aka Factory Acceptance Testing / Factory Witness Testing) simulates real-life load situations in order to ensure that the UPS system and its components work properly and meet the agreed upon specifications. Acceptance testing also includes a variety of site inspections and simulations (e.g., static-state tests / failure simulations), as well as multiple conformity checks.
While commissioning your UPS you will need to ensure that your batteries are properly configured and calibrated. Performing battery calibration will essentially ‘force’ the UPS’ battery to turn on, run out, and charge back up again – thus teaching your UPS system that the true runtime is.
Load bank testing is designed to measure and validate the operational performance (and battery health) of your UPS system. This allows you to accurately assess the condition of your battery system while keeping an eye out for any failures and irregularities in individual blocks.
Maintaining your UPS system is an essentiality. Here’s a look at some of the best practices:
Below are some common maintenance issues and solutions; be sure to add them to your maintenance service schedule.
It ultimately comes down to purpose:
Acceptance testing can be performed by the end user, however, it’s always worth hiring a professional for a second set of eyes.
At the very least you should have your UPS system’s load bank tested once a year.
Isaac Prakash
Author